# Quote — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

> It is not easy to fall into any absurdity, unless it be by the length of an account; wherein he may perhaps forget what went before. For all men by nature reason alike, and well, when they have good principles. For who is so stupid as both to mistake in geometry, and also to persist in it, when another detects his error to him?
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> By this it appears that reason is not, as sense and memory, born with us; nor gotten by experience only, as prudence is; but attained by industry: first in apt imposing of names; and secondly by getting a good and orderly method in proceeding from the elements, which are names, to assertions made by connexion of one of them to another; and so to syllogisms, which are the connexions of one assertion to another, till we come to a knowledge of all the consequences of names appertaining to the subject in hand; and that is it, men call science. And whereas sense and memory are but knowledge of fact, which is a thing past and irrevocable, science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another; by which, out of that we can presently do, we know how to do something else when we will, or the like, another time: because when we see how anything comes about, upon what causes, and by what manner; when the like causes come into our power, we see how to make it produce the like effects.
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> Children therefore are not endued with reason at all, till they have attained the use of speech, but are called reasonable creatures for the possibility apparent of having the use of reason in time to come.

- Author: [Thomas Hobbes](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-hobbes.md)
- Book: [Leviathan](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-hobbes/leviathan.md)
- Page: 21
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes#Chapter_5) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-hobbes/leviathan/it-is-not

## More from this book

> And when all the world is overcharged with Inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is Warre, which provideth for every man, by Victory or Death.

p. 181 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-hobbes/leviathan/and-when-all.md)

> " and where men build on false grounds, the more they build, the greater is the ruine:"

p. 140 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-hobbes/leviathan/and-where-men.md)

> And for Incoherent Speech, it was amongst the Gentiles taken for one sort of Prophecy, because the Prophets of their Oracles, intoxicated with a spirit, or vapor from the cave of the Pythian Oracle at Delphi, were for a time really mad, and spake like mad-men; of whoose loose words a sense might be made to fit any event, in such sort, as all bodies are said to be made of Materia prima.

p. 226 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-hobbes/leviathan/and-for-incoherent.md)